Because I used to spend every day of every summer of my teenage years covered in tanning oil on my best friend’s trampoline, I now spend one day every year naked in a small room with a woman named Meredith who takes not one, but two photos of each individual mole on my body.
After Meredith finishes her photography — a long process, considering I have 124 — her work is sent to a lab where a doctor will screen all the images to check for abnormalities by comparing them to my photos of years past. A few days after that, I receive a report cataloging each mark along with its cancerous risk-level… which is how, last week, I found myself in an emergency dermatology appointment, trying to figure out if the bleeding spot that had recently shown up on my leg was an ingrown hair or squamous cell carcinoma.
I was already not having a good day when I read the report and realized I’d need to go to the doctor immediately. On my way to work, a signal at one of the subway stations was broken, causing our train to be stuck underground for almost two hours. I’d gotten blood drawn the day before and had been so dehydrated, my inside elbows were still sore and bruised from where the needle had unsuccessfully punctured my veins in both arms. The dude I’d been seeing, who’d previously made me feel safe and warm, had cooled off our communication, making me feel small and sad. I had such a severe coughing attack, a leftover symptom of pneumonia I haven’t quite been able to shake, that I had to remove myself from the subway car and almost passed out on a station bench under the supervision of a sweet family of tourists who’d taken the train the wrong way trying to get to Manhattan and kept asking directions in between my coughing spurts.
I had not had a day this bad since earlier this year when I’d worked from home to accommodate the schedule of a bartender I liked, even though Grimace was going to be visiting my office with the new flavor of purple McFlurry. He’d cancelled on me last minute, so instead of progressing our relationship to a physical level or meeting a beloved McDonald’s character, I’d spent the day investigating the odd sounds coming from my kitchen, eventually making the horrific discovery that a family of mice had taken up residence in the top of my stove.
Luckily, I’ll start out by saying this — it’s not likely I have leg cancer. My dermatologist, bless her, was able to get me in within hours of reading the report and reminded me, much like the time I visited her office because I was convinced the dissolvable stitches from my surgery had not dissolved and were stuck in my thigh and her hot nurse had to tell me, actually, that was just lint from my jeans, this was also probably nothing. (It is worth noting this is the second-most embarrassing thing I’ve done in front of her hot nurse, the first being when he said he needed to take a photo for my file and me, thinking he meant the aforementioned stitches in my thigh, pulled my pants down, only to have him turn around, see me in my underwear and be like, “oh… I meant of your face for identification purposes.” It’s simply incredible I did not die on the spot.) Anyway, paired with my recent impulse purchase from the Urban Outfitters check-out line of a tool that looks like a hand-held cheese-grater meant to sandpaper away the hair on your legs along with my habit of using the disposable razors at Equinox, she thought it was more likely these factors had contributed to the unsightly spot on my shin rather than all my sunbathing sixteen years ago and advised me to come back in three months to check in.
Maybe it’s because I am getting older or maybe it’s because my day had already been so bad, but this medical scare gave me a low-level of unshakeable anxiety for the rest of the week in a way they usually do not. For someone who has never had cancer, I’ve been told I maybe have cancer more times than most and it’s numbed me so much that I will be actively exploring it in therapy. The first time, I was in eighth grade and, months after I’d accidentally skied off a cliff, landed in a pond, shattered my helmet and fractured my elbow, the bruise that stretched from the middle of my bicep to the tip of my pinky had still not gone away. It had turned out just to be iron build-up, but my pediatrician floated the idea it was due to a terminal illness as easily as he still pretended he saw panda bears when he looked in my nostrils and multiple doctors since then have given me similar diagnosis when speaking of abnormal cells in my skin, eyes or breasts.
It was mid-2021 when I started having Meredith take photos of my body and, at the time, I had just started seeing a man with a mullet whom the only accurate way to describe is “dirty hot.” He frequently wore muscle tanks, but smelled like Aesop soap and read his own tarot cards every morning. His arms were covered in well-designed tattoos, but upon further inspection, I’d realized they were almost all in tribute to his home state of Florida. To this day, when I hear the song “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” I immediately think of him. We’d met on Instagram, when he’d commented on one of my posts “God Tier fit,” then slid into my DM’s asking to take me to dinner… with dessert at his apartment. We were not exclusive, a fact I knew even before I asked a few months in because he’d only called me by my given name once, instead constantly referring to me as Baby, Angel, Sweetheart or My Love.
After we’d confirmed our non-exclusively, the cutesy nicknames stayed, but he’d also begun to refer to me as “the sweatiest girl he was dating,” likely because this was true. I do sweat more than anyone I’ve ever met (I’ve earned the nickname “Puddles” at 305 due to the iconic amount of water left on the floor underneath me when a class has finished) and he was hyperaware of it because I frequently worked out at his apartment. At the risk of putting too much information on the Internet, but with the purpose of furthering this story, when he’d once taken my top off after I’d been exercising, I’d realized the heavy cardio my dancing required had somehow caused my right nipple to completely invert. This was a new thing and I was alarmed, but eventually, it became a joke between us — I was the sweaty girl with the sometimes-inverted nipple he was dating — and, while I had wished I’d gotten an adjective like hot or very hot or hottest, I liked that we had this language of inside jokes.
Eventually, though, that initial alarm came back. We’d stopped seeing each other by then, but my nipple was still inverting in a way I did not like and now, I didn’t even have a hot guy around to make me feel better about it. A late-night Google search led to the scary realization that a newly-inverted nipple can be an early sign of breast cancer and considering this was the breast I’d found a lump in a few years prior, I was concerned.
It’s advised that women should start getting mammograms when they turn 40, but when I was still in my twenties, I’d already had four. A small lump had turned into a bigger lump, which turned into the need for a mammogram, which turned into the need for an ultrasound, which turned into a doctor poking a thin needle through my breast tissue to grab cells from the smallish-biggish lump, which turned into me having to do it all over again (and, then, a year later, on the other side!) once I’d come in with my newly diagnosed symptom. I will be paying off these procedures for the rest of my life, but I’m thankful for the aggressiveness of my doctors and their willingness to rule out anything abnormal.
I used to be famous for avoiding the doctor, but as I have gotten older (and my insurance has gotten better), I’ve become the type of person who visits a medical professional even when it’s not necessarily needed (see: the time I FaceTimed the virtual physician with a compression sock on my hand, convinced I had blood clots. I did not.) I do believe a lot of this has to do with working at a place where we publish many, many stories involving normal symptoms that lead to rare and terminal ailments. But, I have also been trying to become someone who advocates more for their health and if that requires me paying a $25 co-pay to receive reassurance I am not dying, so be it.
I wrote most of this post on Friday night at a bar in my neighborhood with swollen eyelids from crying after texting the guy I’ve been seeing “I just want to feel as if there is space for me in your schedule again” and not receiving a response. I wrote the rest in the Bed Stuy CityMD waiting room on Sunday morning when I realized too late my right eye wasn’t swollen from crying, it was actually infected.
I have reoccurring nightmares about this CityMD, partly because it’s where I went when I had pneumonia, but mostly because it is down the street from the man with the mullet’s apartment. Every time I am there, I envision running into him — him, looking stylish in his fitted, checkered pants with a singular gold hoop in his ear and me, coughing up blood or oozing pus from my eye or, even worse, just being insanely sweaty. My week had already been so bad that I entered the office with dread, assuming he’d have to be behind the closed doors and was so visibly pleased with this little win when he wasn’t, the nurse asked twice why I was smiling even though my eye was blood red.
The last time I’d gone to see a doctor for an infected eye, they’d told me (you guessed it!), it could be cancer, but this time, I was pretty sure it was just because my daily contact lens was on its twentieth use. Still, to rule out the possibility of something more insidious, I’ll be spending a day this week in the office of an ophthalmologist for an emergency appointment, my sixth doctors appointment in the last 10 days. This marathon trip of appointments began when I had water shoved so far down my ear that I couldn’t hear, so the doctor made me shake my head until it poured out on the floor like a cartoon character, included a consultation about all the ways my body will betray me if I decide to freeze my eggs and led to right now, waiting in the Walgreens pharmacy line dressed in my full swim suit so I can try to enjoy a day at the beach with my friends and an alarm set every two hours to drop antibiotics into my irritated eyeball.
So, no, it hasn’t been my best week. I do not look cute and feel kind of sad and am startlingly not as numb as I tend to be, a thing my therapist thinks is good and I think is embarrassing after she watched me cry on camera for 45 minutes Friday afternoon. Still, I’m hopeful that things will get better and the low-level pit of anxiety in my stomach will wash away and, maybe, my minor medical problems this week will be over.
If not, at least I’ll hit my deductible.